


Fix What's Broken

by Donda



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Warm Bodies Fusion, Gen, Platonic Soulmates, Zombies, even in death apparently, zombie!max
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-08 13:34:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 11,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11082642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donda/pseuds/Donda
Summary: A new corpse is brought to the Citadel, but it's not like any Furiosa has encountered before. What makes it different might be important, but she'll have to keep it out of Joe's hands if there's going to be any hope for any of them.Inspired by a tumblr prompt.





	1. Chapter 1

He isn’t quite sure how this all happened. He knows he must have been alive at one point, probably had friends and family and maybe even a job, but he doesn’t remember any of that now. There are others like him, he knows that, but as far as he’s aware they don’t know how this happened either. If he had ever been much of a talker, he certainly isn’t now, and most of the others barely seem capable of speech. Groans and grunts are about the extent of their minimal communication with each other, on the rare chances that he happens across one.

The one thing he does know is that life (or unlife, he supposes) isn’t that easy out here. There aren’t a whole lot of dead like him, and not a whole lot of living left, either. The living that do remain tend to keep themselves pretty well defended. Some are enclosed within walls, some hide out in landscapes that aren’t particularly easy to traverse when you’re dead, and the ones that aren’t hiding in safety move through the wastes in modified, armored cars, often hunting the dead for sport.

His kind used to congregate around cities and towns, any collection of people they could prey on, but bit by bit they had picked them off, until the dead were forced to wander in search of what living might remain. Many groups found nothing, and probably withered and died out in the desert without the flesh of the living to sustain them, and many others were picked off by roaming bands of living. He himself had been shot and run over more times than he could count anymore, but he discovered it was easy to pretend you were completely dead when you were already mostly dead, and later found that staying away from groups of his own kind tended to be safer. A shambling herd of corpses was hard to hide (often too stupid to hide as well) and made an easy target, whereas a single dead man on his own was less likely to attract attention and it was much easier to duck away if he heard vehicles coming. Plus, on the rare occasions he caught a person (or animal, or honestly just found anything dead) he didn’t have to fight over it with other corpses. It was all his, and he could hide out and live off it for as long as it lasted.

And so he wanders, waiting and searching for the next meal to come along, just trying to survive even when the odds are mostly against him.

When he’s discovered by a group of living he assumes are roaming hunters, he hopes they’re bad shots and gets ready to play dead-dead as they start to zoom around him. Strangely enough, not a single one fires shots, but they stop their vehicles in a circle around him, and climb out to fight him by hand. They look a little dead themselves, pale and painted up like skeletons, but he knows the scent of the living when he smells it.

They seem to have this down to a routine, one baiting him in front while another tackles him from behind, and sooner than he knows it, he’s on the ground, arms behind his back, and they’re fitting a metal muzzle over his head.

A corpse is hardly a threat to the living if it can’t bite, and he knows this, but he’s just hungry enough to lunge and snap his teeth at them when they let him back up. They fight him off for a while, seeming to have fun with it more than anything, but eventually one drags him back by the chain on his muzzle and hitches him up to the back of one of their cars.

They drive away slowly, a few on the back yelling at him and baiting him as they move, drawing him forward by the deep hunger that he feels in his bones more than his stomach. He keeps up for a little while, stumbling forward as quickly as he can, but when he loses his footing and falls, none of them seem to care, and they continue to drag him along behind them.

His clothes are even more torn up than usual when they finally stop, but he’s only missing a bit of skin and is generally glad he doesn’t feel pain anymore because that probably would have hurt. They hold his chain leash tight and the ground under them suddenly lifts into the air, carrying him and the living men and a couple cars with it. It takes him a while to orient and realize it’s a lift. They bring him up into a massive, natural stone tower and then lead him, laughing and taunting and shoving all the while, through numerous tunnels until they reach a room where they fight him to the ground again, chain his feet together, and hoist him up into the air. He’s so beyond overwhelmed by everything going on around him, his brain mostly processing it but his body hardly able to keep up with what he wants it to do, that he doesn’t manage to put up much of a fight. He’s mostly disappointed that the muzzle means he can’t manage even a single bite, despite his desperate need for sustenance.

They leave him hanging like that, and he heaves a raspy sigh. He doesn’t know what they want with him, but he doesn’t anticipate that it’s going to involve feeding him.


	2. Chapter 2

Furiosa sighs. She hates going to the Blood Shed because that’s where the Organic Mechanic works on his ‘cure.’ Zombies may be just mindless corpses, but they were people once, and what the Organic Mechanic does to them is sick, even to her numbed sensibilities. She’ll shoot one in the head any day to defend herself, but at least she doesn’t experiment on them.

It’s bad enough that one of her duties is to keep them alive long enough for him to work on them. Sometimes the War Boys wrangle in an entire group of them, but there are periods where sightings of the dead in this territory are few and far between, and it would be a waste to let any of the ones they have simply wither away, at least before the Organic gets to them. And of course Joe thought she would be the perfect person to handle them. Who better than someone with a metal arm, who can grab a corpse and easily subdue it without worrying about getting a hand bitten?

She’s glad that at least the Organic isn’t cutting one open again when she gets there this time, but he does have one tied down to a makeshift table. It groans and tries to get up, seeming to not be aware that its limbs are bound, as he slowly injects something into it. Furiosa walks past the row of others hanging by their feet and tries not to look at them as they move and groan and snap their teeth at her. One hangs completely motionless, though, and she can’t help but stop and glance at it, thinking at first that it must have expired.

It stares at her, eyes unblinking but somehow still alive in their own way. She’d almost say they hold a look of fear if she didn’t know better. She doesn’t recognize this one, a scruffy thing in a leather jacket with a higher than average number of old bullet and knife wounds. It must have been brought in recently. The corpse moves, just the slightest bit, a little grunt coming from it but nothing more, and she shakes her head. Something’s wrong with that one. Maybe Organic has already experimented on it. Maybe one of his random guesses finally did something.

She turns her mind back to the task at hand. “Latest shipment from Gastown,” she says to the Mechanic as she strides toward him and holds out the small crate of clinking glass bottles she had received on her recent trade run. More rare chemicals and medications to try on his dead test subjects, she guesses.

She never believed for an instant that Joe ordered him to find a cure because he wants to save humanity, and the day she put together that the tyrant had been bitten, it all made sense. She’s not supposed to know, of course. She’s sure he’s told nobody but the Organic Mechanic and the Prime Imperator. He’d lose control of his little empire if more people knew.

She’s pretty sure the only thing keeping him from turning into one of them (she glances over her shoulder at the writhing, groaning dead and shudders) is the medication the Organic Mechanic gives him every day, probably something left from the Before Times, developed before everything went completely to hell, to keep a person human after a bite. But the Organic Mechanic has gotten a little more fervent in his experimentation lately, and Furiosa guesses that the supply of old world medication Joe is taking is starting to run out. Truth be told, she looks forward to the day he turns into a corpse and she can shoot him in the head. In the mean time, she keeps her expression stony, pretends to be loyal, and does her job.

The Organic Mechanic is looking eagerly through the crate, glancing up now and then at the row of hanging dead, probably deciding which one is going to get which treatment. Furiosa turns away, her task done. The living men hanging by their feet and stuffed into cages to be bled for Joe’s War Boys aren’t much more comforting than the dead.

“Feeding time tomorrow,” the Organic reminds her off-handedly as she starts to walk away.

Furiosa pauses only briefly. “I know my job,” she says with a forced calm. She continues on, but can’t help but look at the new corpse as it stares at her again. She stops. “Did you do something to this one?” She points to it.

The Organic Mechanic looks up again. “Hm? Just got that one in yesterday, haven’t touched it yet.”

Furiosa steps toward it. It watches, but doesn’t move. She reaches for it, and it doesn’t even snap its teeth. “There’s something wrong with it,” she comments. The others around her groan in desperation and try to reach her. “Take this one down,” she orders of a nearby War Boy. “I’m putting it in quarantine for now.”


	3. Chapter 3

He can’t help but continue to stare as she reaches toward his face with her flesh hand. Something about her entrances him, and his hunger feels, if not forgotten, at least contained. She calls to the pale men who had brought him here, and he snaps out of it as they approach. Nope, hungry. Very hungry. He swings his body forward and snaps at one, trying at the same time to pull his tied arms free to grab him, and the man nearly jumps back, despite the presence of the muzzle.

“Wait,” the woman with the metal arm says to the others, and steps toward him again. He goes still. She narrows her eyes suspiciously at him, then steps back and lets the pale ones continue their work. They bring him down to the ground and he struggles to get his teeth into one, but as soon as they have him down she steps forward again and grabs his muzzle in her metal hand and drags him up from the ground.

Her gaze on him is intense, and after he’s on his feet - half by her pulling, half by his own work - he stands still, not quite sure how to react. He can’t really identify what he’s feeling, but he’s never felt drawn to someone like this. Hell, he doesn’t even remember a time he’s met a living person and hasn’t just immediately wanted to eat them. He doesn’t think the current feeling is mutual, though.

“I think he’s afraid of you, boss,” one of the skeletal men says, but the woman shakes her head without taking her eyes away. She’s nearly glaring, trying to figure him out.

“Corpses don’t feel fear. They don’t feel anything.” She hauls him forward suddenly, and he grunts in surprise and stumbles after her. 

He’s not really aware of where they’re going, instead focusing on keeping his stupid corpse feet moving and not stumbling, but eventually she stops, opens a barred metal door, and pushes him in. He turns slowly to face her again as she closes the door, and she pauses, but then clicks the lock shut firmly and yanks on it to make sure it’s not going to open again.

She stares at him a moment longer, and he’s suddenly drawn to _say_ something, but in the time it takes even a single word to slowly trickle up to the surface, she shakes her head, huffs an almost frustrated sigh, and leaves. He, too, heaves a long sigh and he leans his weight against the bars next to him.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He may not particularly like killing to live, but as far as he and his way of life are concerned, the living are for eating and that’s just the way it is. So why doesn’t he want to eat _her_? Frankly, it’s weird, and he wonders what’s wrong with him.

She comes back the next day, and he’s lying across the floor of his cage, but he sits up as he smells not just the scent of a human approaching, but the scent of fresh blood. He barely manages to get to his feet just before she stops in front of his cage, and he leans his head against the bars in front of him and stares.

She looks a little uncomfortable, and he forces himself to blink and look away, but it’s hard to keep his eyes from drifting back toward her.

“Well, let’s hope you at least eat,” she says with a sigh, more to herself than him. With a bit of a wet thud, she drops an unrecognizable chunk of raw meat she had been carrying, then slowly unlocks the door.

He watches but doesn’t move.

She takes a breath, as if preparing herself, then opens the door and rushes inside in one smooth movement, and before he can react, she slams him up against the front of the cage and presses his chest into it. He groans a bit, but doesn’t push back. She quickly unlocks his muzzle and lifts it off his head, then unties his arms and a second later she’s back out of the cage. He simply stands there, and her brows lower over her eyes as she watches him.

She takes a step back, then leans down to pick up the meat she had dropped earlier and tosses it toward him. It lands on the ground just outside of the cage bars, easily within his reach. He looks at it blankly. He’s hungry. He knows he’s hungry. But somehow, when she’s around, it’s almost like he could forget. He crouches down and reaches through the bars toward it anyway, since she is being nice enough to offer it to him. He brings it toward him and messily squeezes it through the bars of the cage.

“Thank… you,” he says in a vague wheeze of breath, surprising himself with his ability to get not just one but two words out, but the woman doesn’t react as if she recognized the sounds as speech. He’s a little disheartened by it, if he’s being honest. It takes so much effort to get much of anything across the void that seems to exist between his mind and his body, that something like this going unnoticed is possibly the biggest disappointment he’s bothered feeling since he died.

He expects her to leave him now, but she simply takes a step back, crosses her arms, and watches him. He supposes she’ll want to make sure he actually eats it, that he’s not far gone enough to be useless for whatever that man was doing to the other dead he had. He doesn’t know if he really wants to be used for that, but at the same time, he guesses his alternative is probably target practice. It’s not like they’re just going to release him.

Also he _is_ hungry.

He turns his back to her before he takes the first bite. He gets a feeling that watching a corpse eat doesn’t really bother her, but somehow, suddenly, it does bother him a little.


	4. Chapter 4

She watches the corpse finally eat the meat she gave it, though she raises her brow when it turns its back first. Is it… modest? She shakes her head. That’s ridiculous; they don’t feel. It must just be making sure she’s not going to take its food from it.  
  
It wipes its face on its dirty sleeve after it’s done, but there’s still blood in the stubble on its chin when it turns around again and looks at her.  
  
Well, at least it’s not completely messed up. Actually, she’s a little disappointed. It would have been so much simpler to call it a lost cause and put the thing out of its misery than to have to figure out why it acts the way it does. She studies it through the bars. Even a fed corpse should be drawn toward the living. They’ll kill anything with a heartbeat, but this one is just standing idly in the center of the cage.  
  
She heaves a sigh. Well, it’s not completely tame if it still eats, so even locked in a cage, she can’t risk leaving its mouth uncovered.  
  
She opens the door and surges in again, and in an instant has her metal hand wrapped around its neck. It wheezes a little, not needing to breathe but taking in a breath anyway, and she quickly puts the muzzle back on its head and forcefully spins it around so she can lock it. When she leaves the cage again, she almost thinks that it looks a little bewildered, but it must just be her imagination. She shakes her head, locks the cage, and turns to leave.  
  
She comes back later in the day with a War Boy. She stays back and tells the War Boy to approach the cage by himself. He does, and she watches the corpse fling itself at the bars and groan as it reaches out to try to grab him. The War Boy stays just out of reach, taunting it a bit, and she calls him back before she approaches herself. The corpse lets its arms fall, and becomes completely subdued. She steps back and motions the War Boy forward again. The corpse seems a little more hesitant, still a bit distracted by her, but it gnashes its teeth and reaches for him again, like any hungry corpse should do.  
  
She dismisses the War Boy. She’s seen enough.  
  
As soon as the boy is gone, she steps forward and slams her metal hand against the cage and snaps at the corpse in front of her. “Okay, what the hell is it about me? You act perfectly normal toward everyone else…” She pauses, then breathes out a quiet laugh, “I’m talking to a corpse. Great.” She shakes her head and turns away.  
  
“You’re… different.” The words drift to her in a quiet breath, barely even words, but just recognizable enough.  
  
Furiosa’s eyes go wide, and she turns quickly and stares at the corpse in front of her. She’s never heard one speak, didn’t think they were even capable of speech. She’s silent for a good minute, not sure how to react to something she was so sure was just a mindless monster suddenly talking to her. “ _I’m_ different?”  
  
The corpse looks down, seeming to consider her reply. “To me,” it answers after a time, the words obviously a struggle for it to get out.  
  
Furiosa stares at it in silent shock a little longer, then steps back, takes a breath, and turns and walks away. She needs to regroup, to reassess. This is suddenly a completely different situation, and it needs a calm head, which she thinks she’s a bit past at this particular moment.  
  
How the hell can it be talking? It’s obviously a corpse, there’s no doubt there. Even a feral man in particularly bad shape wouldn’t look that sorry. But this shouldn’t be happening. Corpses don’t feel, they don’t think, and they certainly don’t talk. She wonders briefly how much of the man it used to be might still be in that head. One thing is clear, at least. She can’t let anybody else find out about this. Not the Organic, not Joe, not even a single War Boy. Not until she can figure out what is going on.


	5. Chapter 5

He watches the woman suddenly turn and walk away from him without another word, and he doesn’t understand. He steps back until his back hits the far side of the cage and he slowly slides down it onto the ground. He did something wrong. He had to have. But he doesn’t know what. She had asked what it was about her, and he had answered, as best he knew how. He takes a deep breath and lets it out in a slow sigh.  
  
Was _different_ bad? Should he have used another word? He’s not even sure how she’s different. Just that she’s the first person he hasn’t felt like being the monster he is toward in… well, ever. But maybe she’s not different. Maybe she’s just like every other person, and there’s something wrong with _him_.  
  
He decides eventually that even if there is something wrong with him, he doesn’t care. Corpses eat the brains of their human prey because it makes them feel alive again, and he’s realized that being near her feels a little like that. It’s not quite the same - he doesn’t get to live the feelings and memories of someone else - he doesn’t even quite feel _alive_ , but he does feel more _human_ around her.  
  
He doesn’t move, doesn’t see any reason to, but it’s only a few hours before she comes back. She steps straight up to the cage and stares in at him, both hands gripping the bars in front of her. He hauls himself to his feet with the clumsiness that comes with being a corpse, but doesn’t quite dare stepping any farther forward than the middle of the cage. He meets her eyes.  
  
“Okay, since obviously you can…” she says, “talk.”  
  
He’s frozen for a minute. Her tone doesn’t give him much in the way of an option. He has a feeling that if he doesn’t show now that he’s more than a mindless, reanimated body, his immediate alternatives are target practice or medical guinea pig.  
  
He hums in the back of his throat but it comes out as a low growl, making him sound more dead than anything, and he forcibly clears his throat. What does one say? What _can_ one say?  
  
“You… gonna kill me?” He can barely get his voice to actually work, and it comes out as nearly whispered rasps of air. Of course his own survival is the first thing that comes to mind, but they’re words and they’re actually coming out of his mouth, so he’ll take it.  
  
She looks at him almost suspiciously. “Not if you don’t give me reason to.”  
  
“Won’t… hurt… you.”   
  
“But you _will_ hurt other people.”  
  
He pauses, looks away. Honestly? Yeah, he probably would. Unlike her, the men she works with still register as food to him. He realizes he might want to get over that if he wants to survive now.  
  
When he doesn’t answer, she continues. “How can you talk? Can others talk?”  
  
He shrugs, though he knows at least some can get the occasional word out. It’s just generally not worth the effort, not when it takes so much work to get a word across, and not when anybody who would care about words won’t listen because they’re generally too busy trying to blow your dead brains out.  
  
“You _are_ dead,” she says next, half question, half statement.  
  
He nods confirmation. She sighs, and looks at him like she’s not sure what to make of him.  
  
He finally steps up to the bars, and she doesn’t flinch or step back. “What will you… do with me?” He tries to remember to blink his eyes like a living person. Maybe if he can make an effort to not completely creep her out, he can up his chances of getting out of this alive. Undead. Whatever.  
  
Her eyes flick away from him, and he can tell she’s seriously thinking about it. “Technically you’re the Organic’s property,” she says after a minute. “He needs all the dead he can get to try to find a way to… fix things.”  
  
He sinks a little. He may be a corpse, nothing more to them than walking, dead meat, but he doesn’t particularly like the idea of belonging to someone else, like he’s just some object.  
  
She continues. “But I think you’re no good to him if you’re not a normal corpse.”  
  
When he looks back up at her, their eyes meet. He’s not sure how much she really believes her own words, but he’s relieved she doesn’t seem to want to just toss him back to his previous fate.   
  
His question still hangs in the air between them.  
  
“I’m going to keep you here for now, keep an eye on you.” _To figure out what’s wrong with you_ goes unsaid, though he’s pretty sure they’re both thinking it.  
  
“And then?”  
  
She closes her mouth. Clearly she doesn’t know what to do with him.  
  
“Don’t speak to anyone else. I don’t know what they’d do to you.” She turns and leaves again. He leans his forehead against the bars and watches until she’s out of sight, then closes his eyes and groans to himself.


	6. Chapter 6

She goes back the following day.  
  
She’s been trying to figure out what to do with the corpse, but her options are limited. She can’t exactly trust it outside of the cage and isn’t prepared to give it back to the Organic Mechanic. To make the matter worse, her plans to break free and take Joe’s wives with her are falling into place, and she certainly can’t do anything with the corpse then. It’s looking like this particular zombie only has one good option. She puts her hand reflexively to the gun at her hip as she walks.  
  
The corpse is standing idly in the center of its cage as she approaches, and it stares at her. It’s a little unnerving, to be honest. Most dead don’t just stare like this.  
  
She pulls out the pistol and levels it at its head. This is for the best. She told it she wouldn’t kill it unless it gave her a reason to, but sometimes things are just out of one’s control. There’s something different about this corpse, and if she leaves it without killing it, it’ll eventually end up back in the Organic’s hands, and she fears he might learn too much from it. It’s more alive than any zombie she’s ever seen, and if it is somehow a key to figuring out the plague of undead, some step between dead and living, she can’t let the Organic or Joe find out about it. Joe must die, and what better way than the ticking time bomb he’s already got over his head?  
  
The corpse almost looks afraid, she thinks, and it stumbles clumsily away from her, but doesn’t say anything. Its mouth, still bloodied from its meal yesterday, twists behind the muzzle into a shape she can only interpret as apprehension.  
  
She hesitates, but steadies her grip on the gun. She’s killed plenty of innocent people, plenty of people in cold blood in the name of the Citadel. How is this any different? If anything, it’s better. This monster isn’t exactly innocent of much, and this is in the interest of stopping Joe’s reign. Better to just put it out of its misery now. But her mind comes back to the possibility of this corpse being the start of something new. She has to keep it out of Joe’s hands, but can she really just put an end to it? Can she live with being responsible for removing a possibility for the world to heal?  
  
Her aim falters as she questions her choice further. Can she blame this thing for killing people when that’s the only way it has to survive? Can she really just put it to death knowing there’s a mind in there, a consciousness that may be no different from that of a living person? Does it really need to die?  
  
The look of fear is what gets to her the most. This corpse does feel.  
  
She slowly lowers the pistol, letting out a frustrated sigh as she does. The corpse’s body gradually goes from tense to loose again, and after she puts the gun back in her holster, it lets out a raspy breath that it must have been holding since she pointed the gun at it. It still looks a little afraid, though, and doesn’t approach her.  
  
She meets its gaze as she steps up to the bars of the cage. She has to admit she is curious about it. Maybe there’s more to it that she doesn’t know. Maybe there’s more to what’s wrong with the world as a whole. “Do you know why you’re different from the others?”  
  
It doesn’t move, doesn’t answer.  
  
Furiosa sighs. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to kill you. I thought it would be best, but… Maybe there’s something to you.”  
  
The corpse blinks slowly at her, and cautiously takes a step forward.  
  
“Do you know why you’re different?” She repeats.  
  
The corpse shakes its head.  
  
“Have you always been able to talk?”  
  
“Not… well.”  
  
She wouldn’t say it speaks particularly well right now either, but maybe this is still better than usual for it. “Has anything else changed?”  
  
It looks to the side, thinking. “Feel…” But it doesn’t seem to know how to complete what it wants to say. It stumbles around a few words, either deciding they’re not right, or jut failing to say them regardless. “Feel… new things. Stronger things,” it finally completes. “Don’t want to… kill you.”  
  
“And you’ve never felt that before.”  
  
“…No.”  
  
“Can I trust you around others?”  
  
It hesitates. “I… can try.”  
  
“That’s not good enough.”  
  
It looks down. Silence stretches out uncomfortably.  
  
She sighs. “I have duties to attend to.” She doesn’t have time to be standing around chatting with a dead man right now. She came here to kill it, nothing more. The corpse gives a regretful nod, and she turns and leaves. She’ll figure this out, she just needs a bit more time.


	7. Chapter 7

He thinks about what he told her. He can’t quite describe how he feels. He’s always had some semblance of emotions, but they never had much of an effect on him. He likes it when she’s around though, likes the unique feeling of not being driven by his hunger, actually finds, a bit to his surprise, that he likes interacting with a person rather than just seeing them as food.  
  
She visits him briefly each day, and brings him food every few days, though it’s only enough to keep the edge off of his hunger, never enough to make it go away. He’s just starting to get used to the routine of it, of the long days of nothing to do but stare through the bars of his cage at the wall, of getting fed only once his hunger grows nearly to the point of uncontrollable need, until one day, she brings him food a couple days early, and not his usual rations but a chunk nearly twice the size. He looks at her questioningly as she unlocks the cage and takes off his muzzle before stepping out. What’s the occasion? But she doesn’t say, and he doesn’t ask. He simply crouches down to pick up the offered meal, turns his back to her as has become his habit, and starts eating in large, messy bites.  
  
He reaches the point of satisfaction, and normally he would stop here, save the rest for when he gets hungry again, but he doubts he’ll be allowed to keep this (he has a feeling something big is about to happen now) and he doesn’t know when his next meal will be, so he makes himself finish the last several bites, then turns toward her.  
  
She wets a piece of cloth with water from a canteen, then tosses it at him. “Clean up your face. There can’t be fresh blood on it.”  
  
The cloth hits him in the middle of the chest and falls to the floor, his reaction time too slow to catch it. He leans down and picks it up, then starts scrubbing at his face with it. He glances up at her now and then, and she motions to spots he missed until she seems satisfied, and he cleans off his hands before offering the bloodied cloth back to her. She takes it back and tucks it away as she steps back into the cage, then puts the muzzle back on his face, this time with a chain attached to the back.  
  
“You have to act like you’re not interested in eating at all. You got that?”  
  
He nods.  
  
She leads him out of the cage, and he’s surprised to find he’s able to stumble along at nearly the speed she walks, his legs feeling a little less sluggish and clumsy than when she had dragged him into the cage in the first place.  
  
She takes him down to a large bay, and he looks curiously at all the cars they pass by, until she selects one and starts checking it over, tugging him along with her by his chain as she circles the vehicle. She checks the back and then looks under the hood.  
  
“Boss?”  
  
They both turn toward the voice, a man painted skeletal white like the others, but older than most he’s seen, with a quizzical look on his face.  
  
“I’m taking it out to shoot it,” she says with confidence and an air of authority. “Something’s wrong with it, it won’t even eat.” She glances over at him, and he tries to keep his face dull and emotionless, though he is definitely concerned and a little confused by now.  
  
The other man simply looks like her answer just raised further questions. He doesn’t ask, but it’s apparent on his face. She turns back to the car she was inspecting, but continues speaking to him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but I want it far away from the others in case it can infect them. I’ll leave the body out in the wastes rather than risk dealing with it here.” She looks over her shoulder briefly. “Can you tie it up for me?”  
  
He tries his best to stay still and not fight the other man as he steps up cautiously and pulls his hands behind his back after rummaging around for some rope. It’s made easier by the fact that he isn’t hungry anymore, and also the woman is nearby, watching him carefully out of the corner of her eye. Regardless, he pulls a bit at the ropes after his wrists are tied tightly behind his back.  
  
“Toss it in back,” she says, handing the chain off to her subordinate. The man leads him to the back door of the vehicle and shoves him inside, pushing at him until he’s flat across the back seat, and then he ties his ankles and slams the door shut.  
  
He lies in silence, wondering what’s going on, but unable to ask. He hopes she’s lying about the whole shooting him thing since she just lied about him not eating anymore, but he’s honestly not so sure with her.  
  
He remains silent even after she tosses a rifle in through the window, gets in the car and starts to drive it out of the bay.


	8. Chapter 8

It has been hard for her to admit, even to herself, but lately Furiosa has found herself starting to think of the corpse as a person. He, not it. She’s always made a separation there, a split between human and zombie. It was just easier that way, easier to take out an attacking one, easier to treat the Citadel’s captive ones as the livestock they were. They’re not alive anymore, and as far as she knew up until meeting this one, they were just dead meat that didn’t know to stop moving and eating. There wasn’t a mind, so there was no person. But with this one… she can’t convince herself of that anymore.  
  
With time as she kept him in that cage, she gradually noticed that he started to have slightly less of a stoop to his posture, and there was less of a listless tilt to his head. He still looks very far from being alive, but eventually even the dark drips of greenish, oozing, oily blood that corpses have started to wear away from his skin where he had been injured in the past. He even got a bit better at speaking. His voice doesn’t always work well, but he seems to struggle less with getting words out now.  
  
She doesn’t talk to the corpse as the car is brought down to the ground on the lift. She doesn’t talk to him as she drives through the Wretched, doesn’t even talk to him after they’re far out into the wastes and nobody’s around. He doesn’t say anything either, though she can nearly feel his questions burning into the back of her head.  
  
This was a convenient situation, as it turned out. She needed an excuse to get away from the Citadel by herself to go make a deal with the Rock Riders in the pass so she can get through with the War Rig in a couple days. She hadn’t really known what to do with the corpse anyway. Leaving him for the Organic Mechanic to discover and study wasn’t acceptable. She already found that she didn’t want to just kill him, and taking him with her when she left to escape would have been too risky, or raised too many questions. Even muzzled and tied, she couldn’t quite trust him in the back with Joe’s wives, at the very least because he might give away their hiding place before she was able to leave, and throwing him in the cab of the Rig didn’t make sense. Even her War Boys might question that.  
  
But this… this worked. It would have been easy enough if the situation she made up about the corpse were real to just order a War Boy to take him out and shoot him, but she could also claim it as her task just as easily. She was in charge of caring for the corpses anyway, so why shouldn’t she be the one to dispose of one? Ace didn’t question it after she explained it to him, and he is the most likely one to realize it when something is amiss with her.  
  
So, she decided, she’d just let the corpse go. It wasn’t ideal to let a man-eating monster back into the world when things were already in bad shape, but there was something about him, and maybe he could be different. Either way, he won’t be her problem anymore. She doesn’t have the time to deal with this right now.  
  
She gets most of the way to the canyon before she stops the car. He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes are on her as she turns around in her seat to look at him.  
  
“I’m letting you go,” she says, speaking to him for the first time since she took him out of the cage.   
  
The corpse grunts, almost questioningly, but doesn’t move. She gets out and opens the back door, then unties his ankles. He struggles a bit to get out of the car, but once he’s on his feet, she unties his wrists, then cautiously takes off his muzzle. There’s nothing keeping him restrained now, nothing to stop him from attacking her if he chooses, and she keeps her metal arm between him and herself, and keeps her other hand on the pistol at her hip.  
  
“Go,” she says, when he just stands there staring dumbly at her. “Just don’t go anywhere near there again,” she motions back toward the Citadel, “or we’re both fucked.”  
  
He blinks, looks at the arm she’s holding defensively between them, glances at the hand on her gun, and with a grunt, slowly turns and limps away from her. She waits until he’s a safe distance away before she lets down her guard, climbs back into the car, and continues on her way.  
  
The deal with the Rock Riders goes about as well as she could have expected: a high price, but with the Citadel’s resources, she can afford it. When she drives back out of the canyon and heads toward the Citadel again, she passes the corpse, simply standing out in the wastes like he doesn’t know what to do anymore. She shakes her head and speeds past him. Not her problem anymore.


	9. Chapter 9

He watches her drive away, and then just stands there for a long time, glad to be free but at the same time wishing she hadn’t just left him here. He doesn’t know how much time has passed before he finally stumbles forward and starts moving. He doesn’t know where to go, though that’s not new; he’s never traveled with much of a destination in mind, but now he feels lost. He moves aimlessly, not yet driven by hunger, not driven by much of anything. If he were smart, he would turn his back to those rock towers and get as far away as he could, but he feels drawn toward them again, toward her. He was changing, he knows he was, and he wants to find out where that change would lead him. But he remembers her warning, that him going back there wouldn’t be good for either of them. He keeps his distance from the place, but he doesn’t leave, either.   
  
He wanders for a couple days, inching closer but being wary of hunting parties or more of those skeletal boys that captured him before. He can hide from them if he’s in the right terrain, but what he can’t hide from is the massive dust storm that creeps up from the horizon. He moves as quickly as he can away from it, searching for a place where he might be able to go underground, but it catches up to him with deceptive speed and sweeps him up into the air.  
  
He’s tossed about, flung into the ground, picked up again and spun round and round. Lightning sparks around him and tornadoes rip their way across the sands. It’s not a very fun experience, but there’s not a lot he can do as it flings him this way and that, until it finally passes and deposits him face-down in a pile of sand.  
  
He thinks his body might hurt. He’s not entirely sure he knows what pain feels like, but there’s a heaviness in his limbs that keeps him from moving, and he’s glad he doesn’t have to breathe, because his face is buried in sand, and for a while it just feels too hard to get up.  
  
When he finally does manage to lift his limbs and drag himself out of the sand with newly broken bones grinding against each other, he stops to look around. It’s quiet, calm, nothing but settling dust around him.  
  
A sound reaches his ears and he turns around to see a shape in the distance, small and black. The sound of a motor choking on dust floats toward him again. He stumbles to his feet. He doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t know who is with that vehicle, and knows it may be stupid of him to go toward them, but he feels drawn in that direction. He’s a little hungry after a couple days without food, not enough to really bother him or make him think of nothing but hunting down prey like it does when the hunger truly sets in, but he figures he should take every opportunity he can get. That vehicle looks stranded, maybe damaged by the storm. Maybe the people in the vehicle are damaged too. Maybe they won’t put up much of a fight.  
  
He’s limping more than usual as he walks, but he’s still able to walk, so he doesn’t think he has any broken bones in his legs. His arm grinds, though, and there’s a scraping in his side when he moves, but they’re not enough to stop him.   
  
When he finally reaches the vehicle, a big black rig built for battle, he stops behind the smaller trailer on the back, steadies himself on his feet, then takes an unnecessary breath and steps around, ready to lunge at the first thing he sees.  
  
The first thing he sees is five women in white, not at all what he had expected, and like nothing he’s seen in the wasteland before. He stumbles to a stop, surprised. They’re not armed, at least. He scans across them, and there she is. The one who makes him feel almost human. He’s stopped dead in his tracks for a moment, but he snaps out of it and limps toward her.  
  
There’s a scream that startles him as the first of them notices him, and the five in white are suddenly all moving away from him as the short-haired woman looks up with a sharp gaze. She leaps for the door of the rig beside her, reaches inside and drops back to the ground with a gun in her hand, which she immediately points at him. He stumbles to a stop.  
  
“Won’t… eat,” he manages to get out.  
  
She narrows her eyes at him suspiciously. He takes a careful step forward, but stops when her aim moves from his chest to his head.  
  
“Won’t eat,” he repeats.   
  
“What are you doing here, fool? I told you to get away.” She’s not wearing the metal arm, and this is the first time he’s seen her without it.  
  
He searches for an answer, particularly one that doesn’t come across as creepy, but one doesn’t come to him easily.  
  
“Furiosa, do you _know_ that corpse?” It’s one of the women behind her, one with long platinum hair. She’s looking at him with a keen curiosity, her fear tucked away for the moment.  
  
Furiosa twitches her head, apparently a signal to the woman behind her, because she stops and steps back.   
  
“What do you want?” Furiosa’s voice is sharp, still distrustful.  
  
He’s not really sure what he wants, other than maybe to not get shot right now. “I’m… changing…”  
  
Her aim lowers back to his chest and her expression changes, but only slightly. He slowly puts his hands up beside him. Of course he has no gun to speak of, but he wants to show her that he’s basically defenseless before her. He has no intention of attacking her.  
  
“Can be… different,” he says quietly, but it’s all up to her at this point. He can only wait for her decision, and hope that decision isn’t to shoot him.


	10. Chapter 10

He’s changing, the corpse said. Well, at least he could confirm her suspicions about him. “That’s why I let you go. Why didn’t you get away?”  
  
“Changed… because of you.”  
  
She shakes her head, not believing it. He had said before that she was somehow different, but that doesn’t even make sense. How could she have any effect on a dead man? He’s the one who’s different somehow. The corpse turns as he hears the sound of the Doof Warrior’s guitar calling through the distance, and Furiosa squints past him at the dark shapes looming on the horizon.  
  
She looks over her shoulder quickly to address the women behind her. “Get in.”  
  
They all scramble for the Rig, climbing up its side and into the door.  
  
“Wait…”  
  
She sees the corpse take an unsteady step toward her, and she snaps her gaze back to him and steadies her aim at his chest. He stops again. Her eyes focus past him again for a moment, back to the vehicles on the horizon, and she tries to think through the situation quickly. They have to go, and she doesn’t want to bring this corpse, but what will happen to him if she leaves him? They may well just shoot him or run him over on their way past, but what if one of the vehicles stops to grab him? She scowls at the creature in front of her. Stupid thing. Why couldn’t he have just gone away from here? He’s not leaving her much of an option now. It’s shoot him or take him with, unless she wants to risk all her effort keeping him away from the Organic to go to waste.  
  
She looks over her shoulder as Joe’s wives pile into the back seat of the Rig and close the door behind them. Can she trust him? She’s still not sure.  
  
“Front seat,” she says, lowering the gun but keeping the safety off. “Don’t make me regret this. I will shoot you if you make the wrong move.”  
  
The corpse seems a little taken aback, but she motions toward the Rig, and he starts moving with a lurch. He passes her, his eyes staying on her as long as they can, and he crosses around in front of the Rig. She hears him open the passenger door as she quickly straps her arm back on and climbs in herself.   
  
He struggles to get into the Rig, one of his arms bending at a bit of an unnatural angle when he puts weight against it. She reaches behind his seat as he finally makes it in and she grabs the gun strapped there. The women in the back look incredulous.  
  
“Furiosa, what—“  
  
She hands the gun to Toast. “He’s coming with us. If he tries to attack, just shoot him.”  
  
Toast takes the gun and points it dutifully at the corpse as he settles uncomfortably into the passenger seat, looking warily over his shoulder, and Furiosa tries to ignore the confused and concerned complaints from the others. She keeps her own gun right by her side as she goes through the kill switch sequence and starts the Rig.  
  
The corpse sits stiffly in the seat, his hands held close to himself, as if doing anything else would get him shot. To be fair, he might not be far off. Toast looks a bit on edge having a zombie in the truck with them, and Furiosa doesn’t know how quickly the other woman might react to any movement on the corpse’s part. She keeps her own eye on him as she drives, hoping she hasn’t just made a very bad decision.   
  
They make it only half way to the canyon before something goes wrong. A deep rumbling shakes the Rig, and she can feel the great beast groan and struggle to pull against the extra drag. It takes her a moment to put it all together. Something’s gone wrong, something’s dragging that shouldn’t be. Frustrated, she growls and pounds the steering wheel. “We’re dragging something out back. I think it’s the fuel pod.” She pulls a strap from the dashboard and wraps it around the steering wheel to keep it steady. There’s enough open road between them and the canyon that she should be able to see if she can fix the problem and be back before they risk running into anything.  
  
She looks over at the corpse who looks no less bewildered and concerned than he had earlier, then back over her shoulder at Toast. She’s still got the gun trained on him, and Furiosa decides she has it under control. She’d rather not leave the corpse alone with them, but doesn’t have much of another option. She locks the throttle, swings the door open and climbs out quickly.  
  
She’s not typically back here on the Rig, and it’s been a long time since she was back here while it was driving, but she knows this truck well. It’s a quick climb for her to get back to the fuel pod and examine the problem. The brake line has come unplugged, causing the wheels of the pod to lock up and drag. She quickly grabs it and plugs it back in, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. These things don’t just come out on their own. Could it be sabotage? She was sure all her War Boys had been torn from the Rig in the storm. She even checked. Could someone have gotten onto the Rig without her knowing it? She hurries back toward the cab.


	11. Chapter 11

He’s not entirely sure if he can actually drive, but figures it can’t be that hard in a truck that’s already moving, and it occurs to him that it feels odd to be sitting in the passenger seat of a truck moving at full speed without a driver. He glances over his shoulder at the woman holding a gun on him, and motions to the driver’s seat before he carefully moves over toward it. She follows him with the gun, looking at him distrustfully, but doesn’t shoot him.  
  
He unstraps the steering wheel as he sits down in the driver’s seat and adjusts the truck’s course a bit, steering toward the canyon Furiosa had been heading for.  
  
“Filth! You traitored him!”  
  
There’s suddenly a chain around his neck, pulling hard and yanking him back in his seat. He wheezes a bit, but his arms are long enough to still reach the wheel, so he keeps driving, though he tries to look over his shoulder and see who is suddenly attempting to strangle him.  
  
“What…?” The person behind him sounds completely confused. The chain loosens a bit, then tightens briefly before the man behind him lets go of one end of it with a startled sound and it slips from around his neck. He glances over his shoulder to see four of the women pulling one of the skeletal ones back away from him, the platinum-haired one with her teeth practically imbedded in the boy’s arm. It’s not something he expected, but being what he is, he can’t exactly argue with her technique.  
  
Furiosa is suddenly beside him outside the truck. She gives him an unsure look as she swings the door open, and he quickly relinquishes the seat to her. She glances at the commotion in the back seat as she settles down, and her hand goes to the gearshift as if it might somehow help her with the situation, but she evidently decides the other women have it under control, and she turns her eyes back to the road.  
  
“We’ve got Gastown and the Bullet Farm on our tail,” she comments, and he’s not quite sure who she’s talking to, him or the women in back. They all seem rather distracted with the boy they’re busy yelling at.  
  
“It’s over, you can’t defy him.” The boy lunges forward as he yells at her, and she turns and spits in his face before turning back to the road and ignoring the retort of spit that comes from him.  
  
He’s more than a little on edge as he watches the women dangle the boy out of the door before pushing him out of the rig altogether, and he thinks they could easily do the same to him. He wouldn’t bite them even if they tried. She would never let him live if he did.  
  
Furiosa glances at him as the women settle back into their seats and an uneasy quiet lowers over the cab again. She opens her mouth to say something, closes it again, reconsiders, and tries again. “Do you have a name? Something I can call you?”  
  
He stares at her for a moment, blankly, then shakes his head. “Does it… matter?” Nevermind that he doesn’t even remember what his name was, he’d been reduced to property, and he’s honestly not even sure why she agreed to bring him along in the first place. Why does he matter?  
  
Something twitches in his chest, a strange feeling that he can’t quite identify. _Ba-dum_ , a single beat.  
  
“What do I call you?” she insists.  
  
“Don’t… remember it,” he admits.  
  
She sighs. “Fine. But I’m going to need you here. You may have to drive the Rig. I made a deal up ahead, safe passage, but I’m not sure if it’s still any good.”  
  
He glances toward the canyon. He had seen her go there after she dropped him off in the wastes a couple days ago.  
  
She turns to the women in back. “Get back in the hold, keep the hatch open.”  
  
He watches them climb one-by one into the hole in the floor, the one with the gun going last, keeping it trained on him until she’s out of sight. Furiosa turns back to him. “Stay out of sight. I’m supposed to be alone. But when I yell Fool, you drive out of here as fast as you can.”  
  
He stares for a moment, but she gives him an expectant look, so he nods and follows the others into the hatch in the floor.  
  
“This is the kill switch sequence,” she continues as they enter the canyon. “One, one, two, one, red, black, go. You got it?”  
  
He gives her a nod as she glances over her shoulder at him. She turns forward again, and reaches toward the steering column. She gathers some grease on her fingers, and smears it across her forehead, painting it black until she looks like how he’s used to seeing her. A small shiver creeps down his spine as he spots her gaze on him in the rearview mirror.  
  
When she gets into the canyon, she stops the truck altogether. She looks apprehensive before she opens the door and climbs out. Outside, he can hear her yelling to someone, telling them she has what they asked for, and then he hears the sound of a motorbike engine. He can’t hear what the other people are saying, if anything, but she responds, and then everything goes quiet. He has no idea what’s going on, but he has a bad feeling.  
  
He waits.


	12. Chapter 12

This is not going well. The Rock Riders are upset and the war parties are getting uncomfortably close. They’re not dropping the rocks, and as she sees the first of the war party cars turn the corner and come into view, she knows there’s no hope for this deal. The Rock Riders are simply going to let them get her.  
  
“FOOL!”   
  
She dives over the fuel pod’s hitch as bullets fly her way, and for a terrifying several seconds, all is quiet in the Rig. She shouldn’t have trusted him with this task. She should have left Toast to do it. She runs toward the front of the Rig, leaps onto the sideboards of the passenger side of the cab as she hears a bike speeding down the slope toward them, and she flings open the passenger door. He’s in the seat, at least, and is just finishing the sequence. He punches the final button as she climbs in, and the truck roars to life.  
  
Not useless. Just slow. She still probably should have asked Toast.  
  
“Move.” She practically pulls him out of the seat and takes his place. She’s not quite sure what she was thinking, asking a corpse to drive. She just assumed that he could, since he was in the driver’s seat earlier. Something made her feel like she could trust him. Regardless, he’s slow, and now they need speed. She throws the Rig into gear, lets up on the clutch, pressing the gas as much as her Rig will take, and holds her breath as the truck lurches into motion.  
  
A Rock Rider comes down a steep slope right in front of the Rig, skidding to a stop in front of her, and she quickly grabs a gun on the ceiling above her, leans out the window, and takes him out before he has a chance to get his hand on a gun. She doesn’t bother to swerve around him or his bike as she urges the War Rig forward.  
  
As the Rig picks up speed, she hears an explosion behind them. She glances in the mirror as rocks tumble from above the pass and block the narrow path, and she lets out a breath. But the Rock Riders are still shooting at them, and there’s no time to stop and make amends now. The deal is off, and she needs to move. Beside her, the corpse is looking confused and a bit grim. She tenses as he finds a gun and reaches for it, but he immediately directs his attention outside as the Rig continues gaining speed.  
  
The Rock Riders close in from both sides and are on them before long. They don’t pull their punches, and almost immediately have the front of her Rig on fire, but there’s no stopping now. She takes them out one by one with carefully aimed shots while still keeping an eye on the road through the flames as best she can. The corpse seems surprisingly unfazed by the fact that the truck is on fire, and he shoots out his window alongside her. She’s not sure he’s doing anything more than wasting bullets until she catches sight of one of the Rock Riders drop on his side of the truck, and she decides that even if he is mostly wasting bullets, she’d rather have him here than not.  
  
When the explosives finally stop falling on them, she takes a moment to smother the flames in sand from the plow, and tosses her nearly-empty gun to the women who have reemerged in the back, with a barked order to reload it. As the dust clears from around them, though, she realizes the Rock Riders still have enough natural stone ramps to send them flying above the Rig.  
  
“Sunroof,” she says to the corpse as she reaches across the cab to grab her SKS.   
  
He looks up, looks over at her, looks up, then stands up and opens the sunroof before climbing unsteadily onto the seat. Furiosa quickly loads the clip and passes the gun up to him. It’s a few moments before she hears the first shot from him, and she hopes he can manage enough aim to stop them from getting onto the Rig. In the mean time, she focuses her attention back on taking out as many as she can herself, shooting a couple of them out her window before reaching across the cab to take out a few on the other side as well. Shot after shot fires above her, and she catches sight of at least one bike tumble riderless to the side of the Rig.  
  
“We had a deal!” Gunshots fire from behind, and the corpse suddenly falls back into the cab with a barely-human growl, dropping the SKS between them in the process. She turns quickly in her seat and spots the Rock Rider on the top of the tanker through the back window.  
  
“Move,” she orders to the women in back only seconds before firing through the window, taking the leader down. She glances at the corpse, but he’s looking out the window beside him and fumbling blindly for a gun. She follows his gaze in time to see one last Rock Rider approach their flank with some sort of explosive trailing smoke behind his bike. She fires two shots out the rear window and sees him go down, but his momentum carries him under the truck, and she glances nervously in her mirror as the explosion goes off and the Rig jolts. The fuel pod rolls away behind them. It explodes violently after it veers off-course and runs into a rock wall, but the rest of the truck moves on without anything amiss, so she turns her attention back toward the road.  
  
The corpse settles slowly back into his seat, but as she glances at him, she notices he’s he’s looking down at himself, inspecting his shoulder with a down-turned mouth.  
  
“You shot?” She glances back at the road and then at him once more before turning her eyes back to the road and doing a quick scan for any more Rock Riders.  
  
He grunts. “Doesn’t matter.”  
  
She’d press further, but through the dust behind them, she catches sight of a vehicle not far behind, and she grimaces. It’s the vehicle Joe gave to Rictus, the only truck suited to climb over a pile of boulders blocking its way. And behind the wheel, she’d bet, is Joe himself.  
  
“Can you drive?” She asks the corpse, not a request but a genuine question. It should be safe enough if he knows what he’s doing, and this is something she needs to deal with without distractions.


	13. Chapter 13

The canyon is starting to widen, the path less curved and with fewer obstacles, and he’s pretty sure he can handle driving the truck. He nods at her, and she locks the throttle before they quickly switch places. He focuses his attention on the road ahead of them, steering carefully. The truck following them is close on their flank, and then suddenly it rushes forward and launches itself off a stone ramp, pulling in front of them. He grimaces, pretty sure he’s not prepared for vehicular battle, and continues steering the massive truck as best he can. They fall back along his side of the truck, and a man perched on the side points a crossbow at them. He shoots quickly out the window at the man, but is pretty sure none of his shots hit their mark. Luckily Furiosa leans across and shoots as well, and the man falls with a yell.  
  
The next attack comes in the form of a harpoon through the window, and he stares down at it right between his hands in the middle of the steering wheel. He’s not quite sure what to do, but suddenly it breaks loose from the dashboard, tears the wheel off with it, and pins his hand between the wheel and the window frame of the truck. He grunts and tugs at his arm, trying to free it, but it’s pretty well stuck, and he’s glad again that he doesn’t feel pain because he bets he’d be feeling pretty awful right now, between the hand and the bullet wounds.  
  
One of the women in back climbs out of the truck and with the help of another cuts the chain of the harpoon, and his hand is suddenly freed. He stares down at the empty post where the steering wheel had been. How is he supposed to steer now? Furiosa quickly tightens a wrench down onto it, moments before he hears a yell of “look out!” His eyes dart up to see a rock right in their path, and both he and Furiosa push on the wrench, trying to turn the vehicle.  
  
He didn’t think he still had much in the way of reflexes, but he cringes as the truck smashes into the rock, and he instantly realizes that one of the women had been on the outside of the truck. He jams his head out the window, craning his neck around to see if she made it. If he got her killed… He’s briefly taken aback by the realization that for the first time in his unlife, he’d actually feel bad about causing someone’s death.  
  
She peeks around the back of the rig, and he’s relieved. He gives her triumphant expression a broken little thumbs up, and turns his attention back to trying to steer the truck, to the limited extent that he can with only a large wrench to do it with.  
  
It’s not until he hears a scream of terror that he turns around again, only to see the same woman fall along with the door she was clinging to, right in the path of their pursuers. He stares in shock, feeling a jab in his chest as he watches the other truck roll over her. The truck swerves to try to avoid her at the last second and rolls, and he turns forward, his mouth partially agape.  
  
“Stop! Turn the Rig around. Go back for her!”  
  
He glances over his shoulder as the red-haired woman yanks at his shirt sleeve. He’s not the one in control here. Hell, he doesn’t even know what’s going on. He looks over to Furiosa, his foot faltering on the gas pedal. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her brow creased. She looks at the desperate and distraught faces of the women in back, then back at him. “Did you see it?”  
  
He hesitates. He thinks he saw her go under the wheels, but it all happened so fast, he’s not entirely sure. Guilt jags in his chest, and that feels stranger than anything. So many lives have been lost at his hands, and he never particularly enjoyed it, but guilt had always been pretty far from his mind. Maybe it’s that this death feels more senseless than the rest. But is a death like this really any more senseless than a death for the sole purpose of sustaining an undead monster? Shouldn’t he feel guilty for all those other deaths as well? He gives his head a quick, jerky shake to jog the thoughts out of it. Now is not the time for an existential crisis.  
  
Furiosa seems to take that as an answer. “Stop the Rig.”  
  
He doesn’t know about this, but he follows her order, and brings the massive truck rolling to a jerky stop. Maybe this isn’t a good idea, but he’s finding that he really doesn’t like feeling guilty, and he’d feel a lot better not leaving that woman to die like that… If she’s even still alive now.  
  
Furiosa picks up the rifle he had dropped when he had gotten shot earlier, and checks its clip. “Leave any bullets in here?” She apparently finds that no, he did not, and she quickly reloads the weapon and attaches the scope. Next she looks to the women in back. “Stay here,” she says firmly. She gives him a look that he can’t quite read, then turns and exits the truck. He sits frozen for a moment, then lurches forward and follows her out of the truck. She didn’t tell _him_ to stay.


End file.
